Cachè

It is true that you are not responsible for what you are, but you are responsible for what you do with what you are.
— Jean-Paul Sartre

In Michael Haneke’s cinema, the gaze is never innocent. It is an act that always entails a choice, and therefore a responsibility. Caché (2005), released in Italy as Niente da nascondere, stands as one of his most radical manifestos: a work that offers no protection, that compels us to look, and above all, to interrogate our own role as spectators and as individuals immersed in a web of relationships—historical and personal—from which there is no escape.

The story of Georges Laurent, a Parisian television host, begins with a seemingly uneventful shot: the façade of his house. A stillness that quickly proves deceptive—we are not looking through Haneke’s camera, but through the lens of an anonymous observer who has sent this recording to Georges and his wife, Anne. Georges’ past, until then buried beneath bourgeois decorum, resurfaces without warning, forcing him to confront an act of injustice he committed as a child against Majid, the son of Algerian immigrants.

The theme of responsibility runs through the film in two complementary directions. The first is intimate: the guilt Georges has tried to deny does not dissolve with time, but settles as a sediment in memory, ready to resurface in every crack of apparent order. The second is collective: the personal story intersects with the broader historical repression of October 17, 1961, when the French police brutally crushed a demonstration of Algerians in Paris. Haneke does not link these two levels with an explicit discourse; instead, he lets the viewer feel their subterranean resonance, perceiving how individual responsibility is inseparable from historical responsibility.

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom entails responsibility, and most people are afraid of responsibility.
— Sigmund Freud

From this perspective, the film seems to resonate with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the Other is always a face that calls to us, demanding a response that cannot be evaded, and with Hannah Arendt, who showed how the abdication of personal responsibility—even in collective contexts—is at the root of all moral complicity. At the same time, Haneke’s aesthetics of surveillance evoke Michel Foucault and his analysis of the panopticon as a paradigm of power that watches without being seen, turning vision into an instrument of control.

The direction constructs this discourse through an aesthetics of surveillance: prolonged static shots, images that may come from the diegesis or from the gaze of the unidentified “other,” silences that amplify discomfort. In Caché, being watched is equivalent to being called to respond—not necessarily before a court, but before oneself. The anonymous camera is a device of truth: it does not reveal “who” accuses, but it makes it impossible to continue pretending to be uninvolved.

Haneke operates in a realm where responsibility needs no material evidence to exist. Georges is not haunted by a legal crime, but by a moral debt. When Majid, now an adult, chooses to take his own life before his eyes, he does not commit a spectacular gesture: he performs an act that falls entirely on Georges’ shoulders, without possibility of mediation or justification. The absence of music, the fixed framing, the unfiltered rawness of the act force the spectator to share the protagonist’s position—a position of witness that, precisely as such, cannot claim neutrality.

The film also probes the relationship between responsibility and generational transmission. The final scene, showing the meeting between Georges’ son and Majid’s son in front of the school, does not clarify whether there is reconciliation, complicity, or conflict. It is an image that shifts attention from the past to the future: can guilt be inherited? Is it possible to break the cycle of denial? No answer is provided, because Haneke refuses the comfort of narrative closure. The audience is left in a suspended space of uncertainty—the same space where one decides whether to take responsibility to look—and act—or to look away.

Twenty years after its release, Caché retains its disruptive power. It remains a work capable of disorienting, of generating discomfort, of challenging the viewer who seeks easy solutions. Its lucidity is perhaps even more unsettling today, in an era in which surveillance has become invisible, pervasive, participatory, and where responsibility seems to dissolve amidst the multiplicity of gazes.

Caché is not a film about the mystery of the identity of the observer, but about the mystery of our willingness to bear the weight of what we see and what we have caused. It is cinema that never separates ethics and aesthetics, that recognizes the gaze as a political act and memory as an unstable terrain. Haneke, with relentless lucidity, reminds us that the real danger is not being watched, but continuing to live as if we were not.

Man is condemned to be free: condemned because he did not create himself, yet free, because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
— Jean-Paul Sartre